Air Progress – The Grounding of Darryl Greenamyer

If you haven’t yet read one of these Air Progress articles that Mike Dillon wrote you are missing out. You don’t have to be some sort of aviation wonk to appreciate the stories that Mike relates and the engaging voice with which he writes. Like a lot of the “gun writers” that are so popular in the shooting industry, Mike wrote about the sports and the people that he knew and, quite frequently, Mike knew some big names in whichever sport he was into. Air Races were certainly on Mike’s lists of interests and one of the many interesting participants was a pilot named Darryl Greenamyer.

Darryl Greenamyer, for those who may be unfamiliar with him, was a pilot in the Air Force Reserve who later went on to work for Lockheed Martin. While at Lockheed Darryl was an SR-71 test pilot at Skunk Works where he became acquainted with many of the engineers who would later help him make modifications to his race planes. Those race planes, like the Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat below, would carry Darryl both to victory and into trouble as Mike Dillon describes so well in the article below.